Clicky Design team holds UX training session for the wider agency

We love learning new things at Clicky. During our agency catch up, the design team held a UX training session for the whole agency.

Training is a big part of our culture at Clicky – there is always room for improvement! We have been doing some research into UX design over the last few months, and we also got to go to a UX training session at the Albert Dock in Liverpool, hosted by Liverpool Girl Geeks and UX Liverpool. After getting a masterclass in what UX is, and how to use it to produce better designs, we knew we had to share the findings with the wider Clicky team!

So, what is UX?

UX, or User Experience, is a term used to explain how someone interacts with, thinks and feels about your product. Good user experiences don’t just happen – every step of the user journey must be carefully considered and designed.

Success comes from understanding your users, their goals, their frustrations and their expectations. As designers, we need to make it easy for the user to find what they are looking for in order to help them to achieve their goal(s).

Research is Essential

You must understand your user, or you understand nothing. Otherwise, you are just guessing, you’re not strategising or designing, and therefore the product of your endeavours won’t mean anything.

The most important thing to do is identify your user’s goals, as this will form the basis of problems for you to solve. You need to research your user, ask them questions, and get an understanding of what it is they need from you. You can do this through sending out surveys, conducting interviews, focus groups and task analysis sessions.

At the training session in Liverpool we learned about guerilla testing – you can even just sit in a coffee shop with a laptop and offer people free drinks if they do some tasks for you to analyse and answer some questions.

Analysing Your Findings

Your research will inform your content. From your research you can develop user stories, that basically tell you what your users are trying to do. There are lots of different tasks they can be doing on your website, so you need to consider all of these to meet the user’s expectations. Once you know what users need, you can start to design your product to meet those needs.

Wireframing and Testing

Wireframes are a communicator between UX and design. When you have assessed what you need to include you can create a sitemap and start to lay out your content. This is done by wireframing pages, to quickly show how the elements will sit without having to spend lots of time in design when you’re still figuring things out.

You shouldn’t rush wireframing. Often you will go through lots of iterations of a page before hitting something that works. It is important to test your wireframes early to make sure that they work well from a user perspective, and that they are allowing the user to achieve their goals, without hindering them on their journey.

Cat Tinder?

When we presented our UX training session to our Clicky colleagues, we also set them a task.

The scenario: you’re designing a page for a cat shelter’s website. The user has landed on a cat profile page. What do they see? Wireframe the page and present your ideas.

The problem: How can you possibly choose a cat to adopt when there are so many?

Onwards and Upwards!

Joking aside, the Clicky team has learned a lot from our UX training session. UX and its practices are something we will be increasingly incorporating into our services as Clicky continues to develop and grow. Remember, the user always comes first!